supplement, it is at any rate so that it is easier for male than for
female mentality to escape from socialized sex. Woman has been too
much under the necessity of self-preservation to lay down the weapons
of feminine personality and risk the disarmed independence of sexual
impersonality. She is the object, or prey, of male sexuality, and
her strength lies in the pride and in the obstacles with which she
conditions her capture. Much modern feminism is only a sentimental
enlargement of this pride, only a shrewder insistence on her value as
a prize. For the most part the feminist still has the mentality of
the recipient in sex demanding compensation for the indignity of her
position; feminism is an unnatural preoccupation in woman with her
sexual self.
Woman’s case is nearly hopeless, then. Man is just a little better off:
his position affords him the relief, if he is intellectually capable of
taking it, of sexual suicide.
§2
Often we spend hours disposing of some small thing not worth five
minutes’ thought. We have had it a long time, it is occasionally
useful, some one has given it to us, it would be a pity to throw it
away, it has become quite a part of us, and so on. And yet it is in
the way. Yielding to the tyranny of the trivial hanging-on thing
is adaptation. Outwardly we seem to make the thing adapt itself to
us. Actually we are adapting ourselves to the thing--a grotesque
adaptation. Such a thing is sex, the small physical thing; such an
adaptation is the ceremony with which it is decently installed in the
opinion.
With sex there seems to be nothing between masturbation (throwing
the damned thing out) and romance (grotesque adaptation). Even
the scientific attitude is romantic: the implied title of every
learned book on sex is _De l’Amour_. The cases in such series as
Havelock-Ellis’s books on sex belong to romance; they are the
scientist’s storification of sex. After the reader has grown used
to the laboratory manner of the scientist he continues to read from
sentiment not science; and the author himself continues, like any
romantic author, only from the growing morbid fascination of the
subject--a tediously energetic mind unhinged by the baffling triviality
of sex. Every psychologist of sex is a psychologist of sex because he
suffers from a sex-fixation. He is the principal case of his work.
Masturbation is reckoned disgraceful only because it debases sex
to less than what it is; the damned thing is passionately shoved
out of sight instead of granted pious functional importance in the
household of the mind. There is much less disgust felt toward venereal
disease than toward masturbation simply because the former is a large
subject, the latter a small one. The campaign against masturbation
in homes, boys’ schools and sex books is much more intense than the
campaign against prostitution. Masturbation cannot be sentimentalized.
Prostitution, ‘the oldest profession in the world,’ has an honoured
ritual of obscenity and an equally honoured ritual of commerce.
So great is the importance of accepted sex symbolism--the authorized
poetry of sex--that any departure from it is classified as a
perversion, as ‘erotic’ symbolism. ‘Normal’ symbolism does not even
go by its name: it is love. It is not recorded among the cases of
erotic symbolism that so-and-so continually wrote of women’s lips, or
so-and-so of women’s breasts. But several pages (fine print) must of
course be devoted to a few notorious cases (French) of foot symbolism,
and of course to the national case of China, a horrible example
to the Western sexual mind of perverse symbolism. Lip-worship and
breast-worship are normal because they are generalizations: the kiss
has become so poetically diffuse in meaning that it does not represent
the precise local excitement which is its actual sexual rôle, but a
vague spiritual lippishness; the breasts, likewise, are officially not
part of the sexual apparatus, but the semi-divine sensual equivalent of
that heart-bosom-and-chest sentiment into which humanity has glorified
mean sex-feeling.
‘And up the rosy pathway to her heart
The uncapped pilgrim crept.’
--_Byron._
Foot-worship is unnatural because it is local and particular; it
connects sex with a physical triviality. It is nearly as disrespectful
to romance as if the sexual parts themselves were worshipped.
Sexual energy, if left alone, would adapt itself instead of forcing
adaptation, be diffused instead of diffuse. The social mechanism
for disposing of sex makes sex as large and complicated as itself,
intensifies its masculinity. Its femininity reduces merely to an
abstract, passive principle of motion in the great moving masculine
machine; without separate social personality. The social self is
the sexual self, and the sexual self is the male sexual self: the
dramatic pleasure which woman feels in sex romance is masculine
pleasure; in witnessing sexual embrace on the screen or on the stage
she adopts the emotions of the male. Her innate sexual impersonality
if not philosophized, would wreck the solemn masculine machine;
it is therefore socially interpreted as mechanical receptiveness,
metaphysical unconsciousness, social helpfulness. In self-defence
woman becomes sentimentally attached to this rôle: the sexual machine
so elaborately concentrated on her confers on her an indignity loaded
with prerogatives. Slavish sex modesty is converted into sex vanity.
Militant (feministic) woman can do no more than piously emphasize
the negative, obstetrical instrumentality of female sex; pretending
that motherhood is a rational social end instead of a bigoted natural
idiosyncrasy.
This grotesque of socialized sex comes of the stupid attempt of
intelligent man to make nature intelligent. Society is the genteel
human version of nature. It is based on the assumption that man is a
product of the refined integration of nature by time and that it is
therefore a superior, evolved nature. A constant forced transference
thus takes place from the slums of nature into the respectable terraces
and squares of society.
But the very existence of society, of an improved nature, proves
rather that man is a product of the refined disintegration of nature
by time; that society is in fact a defensive alliance by conscious,
contradictory nature against unconscious, consistent nature. And
man stands in deformity between them, a creature part social, part
natural; but also something else, himself. What is social is unreal.
What is natural is unreal. What is himself is also unreal; but unreal
intrinsically, not from deformity.
Reproductive sentiment, for example, is an emotional screen to conceal
how little we belong to nature. For were we to appreciate this little
we should soon appreciate how little we belonged to society. Sex is
even more separate from reproductive instincts in human beings than in
animal beings. Society therefore strengthens the sympathetic connection
between them, this last crucial bond with nature.
But what is this sex that society has raised from a state of nature
to a state of respectability among the intelligent passions? A myth
in which people half believe to keep up appearances of which they are
half ashamed. Only in the private consciousness is it not a fraud; and
here, an eccentric mark of physical loneliness, a sort of memory of
belonging; when actualized, a momentary extinction of consciousness,
as it means momentary consciousness to beasts that belong much to
nature. As a public ceremony sex is constantly in need of artificial
stimulation; its technique is scarcely more than the technique of
costume. It persists through the illusion of numbers, which perform a
gross sex-masque, a lascivious fancifying of nature.
Sex is the tribal totem through which society sues Nature for
protection and recognition, and through which Nature is ritually
flattered. To the Church sex is the essence of flesh. Man is afraid to
admit that he lives largely outside of nature, that his body is only a
soul, a myth. Instead, he uses the myth to re-establish flesh; God is
the authentication of the body.
Sex is the chief religious mystery of man, his most theatrical
exhibition of reality. Parents lie in wait for their children, to
change their little sexual sillies into portentous symbols. Either
they significantly do not ‘tell’ them but work their transformations
by a dark force of silence and suggestion; or they significantly and
poetically ‘tell’ them. Is the child expected not to see that what is
perhaps pretty in flowers is rather ridiculous in people, who for the
most part have other interests besides seed-making and seed-scattering?
Or to treat as religious truth the crazy information that baby comes
out of mother? Unprompted, it finds this just a third-rate curiosity.
If it hears its mother shrieking in labour it will report without
malice but without sentiment that mother squealed like a pig.
Naturally without a sexual conscience, it is gradually bullied into
superstitiousness, reverence or horror of sex. Shelley, on being read
the passage about Geraldine’s breast in _Christabel_, saw a vision of
a woman with eyes instead of nipples. The child’s sight is poetically
twisted to see the nipples either so or as sacred knobs of coral. The
only way a child can be initiated into socialized sex without deformity
of his comic sense is through obscenity, the cynical and painful adult
version of the child’s sexual insouciance.
Psychology is the modern church of sex, provoking an obscene Tolstoyan
piety. Havelock-Ellis says: ‘We must, as Bölsche declares, accustom
ourselves to gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a
beautiful flower’; and quotes the following account of a totem mystery
from Ungewitter’s _Die Nacktheit_: ‘They made themselves as comfortable
as possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and
socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings. Gradually,
as the moral conception of nakedness developed in their minds, more
and more clothing fell away, until the men wore nothing but bathing
drawers and the women only their chemises. In this “costume” games were
carried out in common, and a regular camp-life led. The ladies (some
of whom were unmarried) would then lie in hammocks and we men on the
grass, and the intercourse was delightful [sic]. We felt as members of
one family, and behaved accordingly [sic].’ And Havelock-Ellis himself
again: ‘The nose receives the breath of life; the vagina receives the
water of life.... The swelling breasts are such divinely gracious
insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs at them
and sucks; the large curves at the hips are so voluptuous because of
the potential child they clasp within them.’ The juvenile delinquent of
the streets reacts to this no more obscenely by singing ‘Mother caught
her titties in the mangle.’
Lofty reverence of the female sexual organs conceals a fundamental
disgust with them. Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of
bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble
uses. She thus has for a him a double, contradictory significance;
she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance. The
sex totem is made in her image and embodies for him the conflict
between suicide and immortality. Man himself is unreal. On woman he
gets physical reality. She is his nature, the realistic enlargement of
his own small sexual apparatus. She is the morphological supplement
of his phallus. Through her he can refine, ritualize and vary his
monotonous and trivial appendage. She is the means by which he adapts
himself to what he is unable to assimilate mentally, to the absurd
physical remnant which pursues him in his pilgrimage to extinction and
which he appeases by turning aside to reverence. Sex is a perfidious
intellectual digression into physical reminiscences.
How does woman play her part as the sacred animal of the sex totem?
With ease, since she is quantitatively more sexual than man, more
literally sexual; therefore more impersonally sexual. Sex in woman
is unemotional, constitutionally well-blended--apart, that is, from
the ritualistic education in love that she is subjected to by a
masculine society. Sex in man is emotional; it is segregated; it is
the last touch of nature in him that haunts and torments him and that
he propitiates with pompous and evasive rites. Although, like man,
woman is largely not of nature, what nature remains in her satisfies
itself without pomp or pathos. That civilized woman is slower than
man in arriving at sexual climaxes is due to the fact that her native
sexual ease had been perverted by man’s tortuous psychology into a
self-stupefying philosophical passivity.
Woman, indeed, is so nearly complete in herself, except for the
phallus, that it is difficult to see how it happened, if one sex
must instrumentalize the other, that she rather than man became the
auxiliary apparatus. Phallic worship in man is not pious but politic
(unless he is homosexual, which is another matter); an institution for
advertising the phallus to woman, hypnotizing her with it, protecting
her from the knowledge that she holds the strategical sexual position.
It is perhaps fair to say that as a consciousness man is woman’s
equal. As a physical apparatus he is a clumsily devised gadget. From
the point of view of their fertilizing powers there are millions and
millions more men alive than necessary. With proper husbanding of
sperm (an economy already practised with prize bulls and stallions)
one man might conceivably maintain the world-population if a somewhat
smaller figure than the present were agreed upon as more reasonable
and if birth-control were somewhat relaxed. All propagandist display
of physical and mental superiority on man’s part, all Rabelaisian
gizzard and brain tickling, is an attempt to detract attention from his
obviously incidental character as a physical apparatus.
But it is unkind and even irrelevant to over-press the point. What
is relevant is that we are in a state of semi-conscious transition
between nature and nothing, and the more conscious we grow, the nearer
we are to nothing. In this passage sex comes quietly along, obligingly
diminishing itself except when man, in panic of annihilation, whips it
up and tries to ride himself back to nature upon it. But the passage
continues, his hobby-horse is a phantom.
Panic of annihilation, resistance to sexual diminution, is a social
emotion. Resistance to sexual enlargement is a personal emotion, the
fear of a more brutal kind of annihilation. Sex brings shock; to some
rudimentary forms, simple death; to human beings, intricate death,
death of self, death of death. Homosexuality is an oblique escape from
the violence of this shock. Polygamy and polyandry distribute the
frightening physical solidarity of monogamy. Monogamous couples are
always hungry for company: to dilute sex. This hunger for dilution is
one-half of parenthood; the other half is the regressive hunger for
solidarity.
This natural difference between creatures intellectually like is the
real perversion. Man is a poetic animal; what is natural in him is
pathological. Poetically he is unisexual; when he attempts to make the
nature in him poetic he becomes bisexual or homosexual not poetic. It
is impossible that through sex nature should approve of man or man of
nature. The only way to prevent sex from being a greater source of
discomfort than need be is to recognize it as an anomalous hanger-on
in man’s journey away from nature and to make it reveal its presence
by behaving naturally: bringing about a literal diffusion of physical
nature in human nature instead of a monstrous hermaphroditism or a
monstrous monomania.
§3
Sex as a petty eccentricity of the individual can be easily disposed of
by the individual. As a social symptom it assumes large metaphysical
proportions; it becomes a crux between matter and mind. It demands
legal control, giving society an excuse for power; economic control (as
a medium of exchange), giving society an excuse for motion; ceremonial
control, giving society an excuse for language, manners, communication.
That is, it gives society an excuse for society.
Society keeps control of sex by so embroidering it with sentiment that
the individual scarcely realizes that he is serving society instead
of society him. Every one knows, in the abstract, for instance, that
monogamy is an economic expression; yet individuals participating in
monogamy would be horrified at the suggestion that they were confirming
an economic expression. Marriage is not an economic expression, but
a ‘sacrament.’ Havelock-Ellis says: ‘Since marriage is not a mere
contract, but a fact of conduct, and even a sacred fact, the free
participation of both parties is needed to maintain it.’ And not only
is the economic significance of monogamous marriage concealed by an
argument of spiritual significance, but by a biological argument
as well. Havelock-Ellis further says: ‘Monogamy, in the fundamental
biological sense, represents the natural order into which the majority
of sexual facts will always naturally fall, because it is the
relationship which most adequately corresponds to all the physical and
spiritual facts involved.’ (Compare Shelley’s argument that polygamy
was a biological necessity because the noble horse was polygamous.)
There develops, as a counterpart to public sex, not private sex but
academic sex, sex the tradition rather than sex the practice. Sex shows
itself proudly as an art. It _is_ art. And as it is the male not the
female who tends to express himself traditionally as _man_, art is male
art. It is therefore foolish to point out that there have been very few
great women artists: why should one look for women artists at all in
male art? Art is to man the academic idea of woman, a private play with
her in public. It is therefore foolish to point out that many artists,
perhaps the best, are homosexual. They are not homosexual. Art is their
wench.
By man’s abstractness of mind is meant his personal anonymity; he is a
public creature, only mathematically existent. By woman’s concreteness
of mind is meant the individuality (man calls it ‘reality’) he
recognizes in her and which he attempts under cover of love, to
steal. Woman wears clothes, man wears a social uniform. Woman is
individual-power (brain); man is mass-power (brawn). Therefore man,
though individually a negative force, is as a unit a positive force;
defeating woman as a unit, since the fact that she is individually a
positive force makes her collectively a negative force. Here is the
secret of man’s power over woman and of a woman’s power over a man.
The mysterious ‘reality’ of woman is responsible for her mysterious
position. The only way to correct this position is for her to make
a mystery of man, to flatter, cajole, bully him into individuality.
Feminism’s great mistake is in concentrating on woman rather than on
man. Concentration on woman can only increase the mysteriousness of her
position.
The antithesis between intellectual and intuitional faculties is
really an antithesis between conventionality and unconventionality.
Mrs. Willa Muir, is a short essay on _Woman_, says: ‘Unconscious
life creates, for example, human beings: conscious life creates, for
example, philosophy.’ Human beings are not created by woman’s intuition
(Mrs. Muir should know this), but by the fertilization of the female
ovum by the male sperm. What is meant is that philosophy springs from
the conventional male mind; but that human beings spring from the
unconventional female body; and that the female mind is therefore also
unconventional.
The male mind is conventional because the male body is a mere
convention. The female body is unconventional because it is
individualistic: man gets somewhat socially and vaguely just children,
woman gets personally and precisely _a_ child. The female mind is
therefore unconventional because it is individualistic, that is,
because woman is physically an individual to a degree to which man
is not. Therefore man is intellectual, woman is intuitional: man is
unconquerable monotony, woman conquerable variety. He has a formal,
vacant simplicity, she has an informal, experimental complexity.
Therefore, since he cannot be entrusted with creating human beings and
she can, she must not be entrusted with creating philosophy, which is
all he can be entrusted with. She is not good enough to be entrusted
with creating philosophy because she is intuitional: she is too good to
be entrusted with creating philosophy because she is unconventional.
It is fair to generalize about man because he is a generalization,
unfair to generalize about woman because she is not. Man is male,
man is ‘the sex,’ not woman; woman is temperamentally unisexual, a
person; for this reason perhaps a mystery. Her sex play is literal,
hard, matter-of-fact, truly theatrical; the rest is unconventional,
a mystery. With man, all is sex; he cannot easily grasp the dualism
necessary to any real individual sense. His play is symbolical,
realistic; it is ‘the reality,’ protracted by a tiresome, childish
patience that never wears out. Woman, to save herself from boredom,
is obliged to enliven the scene with a few gratuitous falsetto turns,
which he interprets as co-operation. Even at his boldest man cannot
get beyond a conventional anarchism. He cannot see that he is on a
stage and therefore he cannot see that it is possible to get off; so
that his performance is continuous. And he will perhaps never learn
that anarchism is not enough. His fine phallus-proud works-of-art,
his pretty masterpieces of literature, painting, sculpture and music,
bear down upon woman’s maternal indulgence; she is full of admiration,
kind but weary. When, she sighs, will man grow up, when will he become
woman, when will she have companions instead of children?
LETTER OF ABDICATION
I have done all I could for you, but the only consequence is that you
are the same as always. I had the alternative of ordering a general
massacre, but I should then have had to go away anyhow. It is simpler
to abdicate. It certainly makes no difference to the situation whether
I leave you behind dead or alive. Therefore I will leave you behind
alive, to afford myself the bitter satisfaction of telling you what I
think of you. You will not listen any more than you would if you were
dead, but I should not address you if you were dead. Therefore I will
leave you behind alive, to afford myself the bitter satisfaction of
telling you what I think of you.
You are not gay. You are sticky instead of rubbery. You represent
yourself with priggish sincerity instead of mimicking yourself
with grotesque accuracy. Because you are photographs you think the
photographs are originals. You think seeing is being.
You do not know what you are. I will tell you, though it will not
make the least difference to you, since you do not know what you
are. You are a conceit. You are what you are not. You are a very fine
point of discrimination. But since you do not discriminate, since you
are not gay, since you think what you are is what you are, therefore
you are not: this indeed is why massacre was unnecessary. You are
blind, from seeing; you cannot appreciate the identity of opposites.
You are feeble, from a loutish strength of doing; so that you cannot
surpass doing, let doing instead of yourselves do; so that you cannot
repose. You are cowards, afraid to be more than perfect and more than
formal; so that you are only what you are; you have the perfection of
mediocrity, not the irregularity of perfection. You are superstitious;
you will season the dish with salt, but you will not taste salt
itself. You are ignorant; not only do you not know what you are; you
do not know what you are not. You are lazy; you will do only one thing
at a time; you will act; but you will not act and not act. You are
criminal; what you do is all positive, wicked, damaging; you make no
retractions, contradictions, proofs of innocence. You are without
honour; over-sincere; hypocritical.